Gallery: Regen Projects, Los Angeles

“I knew about the gallery before I ever moved to the United States,” says Philippe Vergne, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art who first landed in the U.S. in 1990s. “If you look at the Los Angeles art scene, Regen Projects, together with a handful of galleries, was really the organization that promoted artists working here from my generation. They represent a group that has been extremely important: Liz Larner, Raymond Pettibon and Cathy Opie, who has been a very important to MOCA not only as an artist but as a member of the board.”

This is the gallery that gave the California-born Barney his first solo gallery show in 1991, when the artist was all of 24. And it was the first to represent L.A. artist Opie, whose elegant portraits of drag kings and S&M fetishists from the 1990s sent a gender-ambiguous lightning bolt through the world of contemporary photography. In 2004, the gallery served as the site of Glenn Ligon’s first solo gallery show in Los Angeles, an exhibition of his gritty text paintings, which borrow passages from a vast array of cultural figures, from Ralph Ellison to Richard Pryor.

The story began in the late 1980s, when Shaun Caley met Stuart Regen at an opening at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Regen was part of an art dynasty, the son of prominent New York dealer Barbara Gladstone. He had worked at the experimental PS1 art space in New York (now part of the Museum of Modern Art) and later served as the director of the Fred Hoffman Gallery in Santa Monica. Caley, an art critic, had just landed in L.A. after a stint in Milan, where she’d served as managing editor of the magazine Flash Art. The two met for lunch. Regen offered Caley a job directing his soon-to-be-opened gallery.

“Stuart had always wanted to have an art gallery,” says Caley Regen, and the ’80s provided just the right confluence of happenings in Los Angeles. “There had been the opening of MOCA and the Broad Foundation. And there was a cluster of interesting galleries: Margo Leavin, Fred Hoffman and Daniel Weinberg.”

“We came to the idea that it would be an exciting venture and it was that simple,” recalls Weiner, who says the couple’s seriousness persuaded him that it would be the right thing to do. “It will sound pretentious, but they talked about the work and how it set a tone for the people they were trying to attract. I’d been showing in Los Angeles since the ’60s. I have very dear friends who I made projects with, from DeWain Valentine to Ed Ruscha. They saw me as an integral part of Los Angeles culture.”

A string of important shows followed: a light exhibition by James Turrell, prints by the innovative German painter Gerhard Richter and participation in a three-gallery tribute to Nicholas Wilder, an L.A. dealer who had helped foster the careers of painter David Hockney and minimalist sculptor John McLaughlin.

The gallery’s biggest coup, however, came in May 1991, with the first solo gallery exhibition by Barney, who would become one of the definitive artists of the decade. The show was a fusion of performance, sculpture, installation and photography. There were objects related to sports (a football jersey) and sex (bondage belts), as well as a metal cooling chamber that harbored an exercise bench sculpted out of petroleum jelly. The exhibition was a surreal examination by the former athlete of the cult of the body in relation to athletics.

“Stuart had seen his work in New York and was blown away,” remembers Caley Regen. “It was indescribable, so protean. He was using materials people hadn’t used: medical things, sports things, the body. I thought it was amazing.”

The show received a glowing write-up in industry bible Artforum. Kristine McKenna, who reviewed the show for this paper, described it as “rivetingly weird,” an installation that drew vital attention “to the complex and fragile interplay between spirit and flesh.”

“You put these things out in the world,” she says. “If you show great art, people will come to you.”

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Nils Norman, Exhibition view, Surrounded by Squares, 2009

For ‘Surrounded by Squares’ Dave Hullfish Bailey and Nils Norman have each constructed elaborate sculptural installations. Both relate to education and ecology, design theory and the creative industries, as well as to the site of Raven Row.

Dave Hullfish Bailey has generated polygonal sculptural forms by feeding patterns of information about Spitalfields’ history of dissidence into 3-D design software used by contemporary architects to model high-rises. Under the shadow of the encroaching financial district, Bailey suggests that alternative models may exist for the ordering of space and information.

Nils Norman is interested in the way corporate culture absorbs what is outside itself, aping innovations from the ecological movement and the playscapes of alternative education, and transforming ideas about collectivism and sustainability into those about management of people and quick profit. For his installation, Norman has designed ‘a prototype workspace for the creative classes’, a hybrid object using amongst other things, aquatic filtering systems, a rocket oven and an arid garden.

Dave Hullfish Bailey (1963, living in LA) has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna in 2006 and CASCO, Utrecht in 2007, as well as at Mesler & Hug Gallery in LA, where he also teaches at Art Center.

Nils Norman (1966, living in London) has exhibited in major museums internationally including Tate Modern and Kunsthalle Zurich. He is Professor at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and currently has an exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York.

Co-founder of Seventeen Gallery, Hoyland, came to London from Shropshire to study at Chelsea College of Art & Design. “I wanted to be a ground-breaking performance artist.” Instead, in the late 1990s he went to work at Coskun Fine Art in Knightsbridge, run by Gul Coskun: “High heels, short skirts and Warhols. The hardest-working woman I’ve ever met.” Inspired, he opened Seventeen in 2005 with Nick Letchford, who he’d met two years earlier in a Hoxton bar. Specialising in video, the gallery on Kingsland Road represents nine artists, including sculptor Susan Collis and Oliver Laric.

How do you find artists?“I meet them in the pub. Finding artists is easy, finding people you like is harder.”

What kind of work catches your eye?“Detailed work with lots of labour involved. I like artists to bleed for it and to see that problems have been overcome.”

What’s been the highlight so far?“Being a gallerist is self-indulgent; it fulfils your art needs and is emotionally easier than being an artist. You get all the cream without any risk.”

Bill Gaytten for Christian Dior, Fall 2012, Paris, 2 March 2012

The Christian Dior show today was a frustrating experience. The dither that has surrounded Dior since John Galliano’s departure demands resolution, if only because you never again want to hear one single morsel of groundless speculation. With Dior’s couture collection in July, it felt like Bill Gaytten was courting resolution by laying out his very capable wares. With today’s show, it felt like he was putting them away again.

“Soft modernity” was Gaytten’s theme. It was a notion whose nebulosity dogged the catwalk, where deflated New Look looks simultaneously evoked Dior’s stellar past and its lunar (as in moonstruck) present. The show began well enough. The focus was on the waist—well, it would be, wouldn’t it?—emphasized by a peplum’s flare or a skirt’s fullness.

Classic portrait necklines were literally twisted in leather. Equally classic houndstooth was exploded into an abstract pattern. The models’ knit skullcaps were a streamlined touch. But then, where, in the past, you might have expected takeoff from such a restrained start, there was just more of the same. Perhaps there was some well-reasoned commercial point to that—and rumors suggest the label has been doing fine under Gaytten—but it felt like Dior by the numbers.

Program notes mentioned “a ballet femininity,” and the full silk tulle skirts that made up the collection’s evening component had a feel for that (particularly a shorter-skirted, long-sleeve raspberry outfit), but there was an intangible lifelessness to the clothes.

Maybe it all comes back to the peculiarity of Gaytten’s challenge. How do you muster enthusiasm for your work when you have no clue what tomorrow may bring?

Artist Nikolas Gambaroff work questions the process of painting and its support structures by deconstructing and re-evaluating traditional methods of production and display.

As Gambaroff himself puts it, “In my work I try to dissect, deconstruct, and re-evaluate (mainly within the limits of the activity painting) the customs, expectations and myths that painting as part of our visual culture brings along.”Works that ostensibly echo the age-old impetus of subjective self-expression are, therefore, conceived as platforms through which to question notions of authorship, distribution and exposition alongside issues such as the social and economic value of art itself.

In addition, Gambaroff’s “staging of the space that a viewer experiences painting in” is designed less to highlight interplay amongst the works themselves, than focus particularly on “the problems of support structures in art (material/architectural but also ideological).”
The introduction of elements from ‘outside’ the traditional compass of painting provides further opportunities to deconsecrate and demystify painterly production in order to debate the mechanisms that confer artistic status.

Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist and one of the pioneers of the New European Painting that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. His art follows the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.

In the early 1960s Richter was exposed to both American and British Pop art, which was just becoming known in Europe, and to the Fluxus movement. Richter consistently regarded himself simply as a painter. He began to paint enlarged copies of black-and-white photographs using only a range of treys.

The evident reliance on a ready-made source gave Richter’s paintings an apparent objectivity that he felt was lacking in abstract art of the period. The indistinctness of the images that emerged in the course of their transformation into thick layers of oil paint helped free them of traditional associations and meaning. Richter concentrated exclusively on the process of applying paint to the surface.

As early as 1966 he had made paintings based on colour charts. Although these paintings, like those based on photographs, were still dependent on an existing artefact, all that was left in them was the naked physical presence of colour as the essential material of all painting.
All vestiges of subject-matter seem to have been abandoned by Richter in the paintings that he began to produce in 1976. Even these supposedly wholly invented paintings retained a second-hand look, as if the brushstrokes had been copied from photographic enlargements.

The extreme variety of Richter’s work left him open to criticism, but his rejection of an artificially maintained consistency of style was a conscious conceptual act that allowed him to investigate freely the basic principles of painting.

Further Reading

And that's when the tough times began: "The bottom fell out," says Regen, quite matter-of-factly.

The financial crisis of the early 1990s forced the Regens to move to smaller quarters up the block to 629 Almont, in 1992.

They changed the gallery's name to Regen Projects and focused on doing experimental and site-specific work in their space and around the city. They organized Richard Prince's project "First House," an old tear-down bungalow where the artist showed a series of joke paintings, among other works. In 1995, they sponsored the installation of Weiner's wall texts at Grand Central Market.

The operation was slim. "There was only two people: Stuart and myself," says Caley Regen. "We answered phones, hung the art, labeled slides. We did everything."

During this time, they also increasingly turned their attention to L.A. artists: sculptor Liz Larner, painter Lari Pittman, and, of course, Opie. In fact, Opie was fresh out of grad school from the California Institute of the Arts when she received a call from Caley Regen about a studio visit. "I didn't even have a studio," Opie recalls. "I was living in Koreatown in an apartment. I shot all of the portraits and did all of the work in the living room."

Even now that she's an internationally known artist, Opie says that her relationship with the gallery remains strong: "I feel like Shaun and I have grown up in this together. Besides having a good eye and being adventurous, she really stands behind her artists. She's never said anything like, 'I know that body of work sells, do that.' Never."

The gallery has also never settled on one type of artist. "Not any of us make the same kind of work," says Opie. "And I don't think that's true about a lot of other galleries."

Regen says she approaches artists not by the type of objects they make, but by the thinking that goes into the work.

"You have to trust their intelligence," she says. "You have to trust that what they have to say is their own."

While the smart programming helped cement the gallery's reputation in the 1990s, the period was not without tragedy. In 1998, Stuart Regen passed away from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a disease he had battled for roughly a decade. An appreciation by Times critic Christopher Knight described Regen as one of the most "gifted" dealers in L.A., and the space as "the first major L.A. gallery to come of age in concert with the city's newly conversant ease as a cosmopolitan art scene."

In the wake of her husband's death, Caley Regen took the reins on her own and pushed the gallery forward.

"People were, like, what is Shaun going to do?" she recalls. "What was I going to be? A trophy wife? I don't know if a job finds you or you find it. But this is what I do."

In more recent years, she's supported the work of L.A. multimedia artist Doug Aitken, who explores the ways in which humans inhabit and alter the landscape. She took on the team of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, known for their manic Internet-era video installations. And, of course, there's the penetrating Wearing, whose exhibition opens this week. Her gut-wrenching videos explore the toxic nature of secrets and lies.

Caley Regen has also overseen a period of unprecedented growth (Regen Projects now has 17 employees). And two years ago, she oversaw a move to much bigger digs, a 20,000-square-foot Michael Maltzan-designed space, on a raffish block in Hollywood. The location initially caused some art world tittering. The gallery faces a marijuana dispensary, a doughnut shop popular with transvestites and a pawn shop.

Caley Regen says the move was inspired by the economics of the space but also because it puts her in better proximity to artists.

"I think what's going on in downtown L.A. is really interesting," she says. "The young artists, the dancers, the writers, that's who I'm looking to attract."

Other galleries, such as Michael Kohn and Gavlak have since landed in the immediate neighborhood. "Regen Projects was the point of rendezvous," he says. "You would go, you would have a drink, you would talk. It's a gallery made by the artists. There is a whole network of relationships around it, a real communality."

Plus, Vergne adds, Caley Regen is simply a good presence to be around: "She smokes, which is great," he chuckles. "Every time I see Shaun, I'm like god, I want a cigarette. She kind of brings the sexy back."

Caley Regen, however, is modest about her accomplishments, shrugging off the feat of maintaining and growing an art space over 25 years.